As mentioned, Athlon 64 FX-62 is a dual-core CPU running at 2.8 GHz, achieved by multiplying its 200 MHz base clock by 14. It has two 1 MB L2 memory caches, one for each core. The other dual-core AMD CPUs we reviewed recently and included in this benchmark were Athlon 64 X2 5000+, which runs at 2.6 GHz, has two 512 LB L2 memory cache and is also based on socket AM2 platform, Athlon 64 X2 4600+, which runs at 2.4 GHz, has two 512 KB L2 memory caches and is based on socket 939 platform, and Athlon 64 FX-60, which runs at 2.6 GHz and has two 1 MB caches and is also based on socket 939 platform. We also included in our benchmark single-core Athlon 64 3800+, which runs at 2.4 GHz, has a 512 KB memory cache and is based on socket 939 platform.

The difference between dual-core Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 X2 is not only the amount of memory cache, but also the fact that all Athlon 64 FX CPUs don’t have their clock multiplier locked, enabling you to increase the CPU clock multiplier in order to achieve higher clock rates. On other CPUs you can only overclock them by increasing the CPU HTT clock (sometimes decreasing the clock multiplier at the same time, as this configuration is possible on all AMD64 CPUs).

In Figure 2, you can see the complete specs from the CPU we reviewed.

Figure 2: Athlon 64 FX-62 specs.

We didn’t compare these CPUs with Intel counterparts (namely Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition) because unfortunately Intel didn’t provide us samples for reviewing. A pity.